


veni, vidi, amavi

by beautify



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, Ballet, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-27
Updated: 2019-01-27
Packaged: 2019-10-17 09:31:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,332
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17557805
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beautify/pseuds/beautify
Summary: In the summer of 1909, in Paris, ballet takes one step forward and two steps sideways.





	veni, vidi, amavi

**Author's Note:**

> my piece for the YOI art history zine, written quite a while ago and not identical to the piece in the zine itself
> 
> i wrote this after i did some reading about sergei diaghilev's ballets russes, but please do not take this to be reflective/representative of anything in particular!

The boy from St. Petersburg, the last and most reviled of the ballet dancers, Katsuki, hadn’t turned up to their first rehearsal in Paris. Which was promising.

“Well, it doesn’t surprise me. They say some terrible things about this one, you know,” said Georgi, waving away a cloud of cigarette smoke. “The corps seem to think he’s the devil.”

“In other words,” said Victor, smiling coyly, “he’s very, very good.”

For the most part Georgi ignored him, as he often liked to do. But he did condescend to kick Victor when he waved a waiter over to refill their drinks. “Back in St. Petersburg, at the Mariinsky, there was a scandal. Something to do with his costume. Too short, didn’t cover him, the Tsar’s mama walked out.”

Victor brightened. “I was there! I thought he was wonderful.”

“I have a feeling about this one,” said Georgi, for the most part ignoring him.

“So do I.”

But after the scandal, Paris was burning to see Katsuki. For Victor, there was no question. He had to have Katsuki, at the very least for the summer, for the company’s premiere. It was not enough to be beautiful. From time to time one had to be appalling. What was it Telyakovsky had said? _Paris is tolerant of things that would be out of the question in St. Petersburg._

Perhaps ‘tolerant’ wasn’t the word he was looking for. Perhaps Paris hungered where St. Petersburg simply starved.

“I think,” said Georgi, gazing dramatically out the window, at the dark, starlit world beyond the walls of the café, “he is going to make problems.”

“Oh, Gosha, come,” said Victor, quietly. He looked down at his hands, then outside, where it was wintry and frigid, where the golden light of the café spilled out onto the snow. “Let us pray that he does.”

 

 

And yet months later, when the two of them were finally, blessedly alone with each other, in a studio, somewhere in Paris — Yuuri bore no resemblance to the boy who had graced every Parisian newspaper, every Russian émigré quarterly in France. For some reason he held back. And Victor could not for the life of him understand why.

There was a faint flush on the nape of Yuuri’s neck, which incensed Victor. And droplets of sweat here and there. But he managed to maintain a fairly gentle look to him, as if he thought Victor poking him with his godforsaken cane was no reason at all to be put off.

“Okay,” he said, rubbing his temples. “That’s enough.”

“Is something wrong?” asked Yuuri, stepping out of whatever pose he’d been in. Victor had stopped paying attention. “You seem upset.”

Of course Victor was upset. Here was his star, his deliverance, the belle of La Saison Russe. Here was his darling, expensive, cute, expensive, cherished little dancer, who Prince Lvov had handed over rather tentatively as though he’d been afraid Victor would smudge him somehow. The only problem was this: Victor had been promised a troublemaker. His troublemaker was not making any trouble. Yuuri’s dancing was, in a word, divine. In two words, a dream. That much was obvious. But it was not what it had been, that night at the Mariinsky, the night he’d debuted, when it had felt to all of Russia as though a star had fallen out of the sky and onto the stage.

“You weren’t like this in St. Petersburg.” Victor leaned his hip against the wall, brows knitted. “This is different.”

Yuuri hesitated. He frowned. He had been expelled from his company after a decade of study with the Imperial Theatre School. And he was, what, twenty? Only just. So this to him was everything. Or it had been.

He pursed his lips. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“This is boring.” Victor folded his arms and looked away. He could not have feigned a more childish sulk to save his life. “I don’t care for it.”

Yuuri gave him a sour look. “Then why am I here?” he asked, a little tartly.

“Because!” Victor cried. “You are a wonderful dancer! And because you are passionate!” Yuuri flushed and made a face at him. “So tell me why you are dancing like — like you want to scrub floors instead!”

“What would you know?” said Yuuri, his voice trembling. “You aren’t a ballet master. You don’t choreograph. You can’t even tell me what’s wrong. Why am I even here? Do you want me or not? I’ll leave! Goodbye!”

And so on and so forth. Victor batted his lashes. Yuuri really knew some astonishingly rude Russian. Victor had never understood where his dancers learned these things. So Yuuri was not such a dove after all. Thank God for that.

“Let’s go to dinner,” he said, wandering off already, while Yuuri stood and scowled at him. “You’ll tell me why you weren’t here yesterday, I hope. I want to hear that excuse of yours.” Where were his gloves? Where was his jacket? When had he rolled up his sleeves, and why did he feel so feverish? This was ridiculous. He’d lose his heart if it didn’t sit in his chest. “Do you like pralines? I do. I suppose you’ve never tried one.” He gave Yuuri a fond look and sighed a dreamy sigh and ran his hand through his hair — because although he was not a good man, he was, at least, a pretty one. “You’ll be so glad you came to Paris.”

At least eventually, thought Victor. Eventually. He walked out of the studio.

For a moment, Yuuri stayed still, watching him go, his eyes dark and his mouth closed and his whole mien closed to the outside world, like an alley cat, giving Victor a hard, flat look from ten meters away. He did not seem pleased. He was sweaty and flushed and he had been battered by an insufferable old man with a cane for twelve hours, and yet he went after Victor. He did. It was almost as if he had nothing better do.

 

 

In all his thirty-eight years of living, Victor had never dreamt of someone like Yuuri.

“You’re so much better than the rest of them,” he said, having pulled Yuuri aside so that the other dancers would not see, “sometimes I really wonder if we ought to bother with the rest of the company at all.”

Yuuri, who seemed distressed by these constant, furtive asides, gave him one side-glance, charmingly cruel, and said, “So stop hitting me with your cane.”

Victor pouted. “I’m not hitting you.”

“Stop fondling me with your cane,” said Yuuri, crinkling his nose.

“It is intolerable,” said Victor, standing up straight, raising his voice only so that the others could not help but overhear, “that an employee of mine should be so rude. And ungallant. And steal my lunch.” Yuuri scowled at him and said something rude which Victor pretended not to hear. “Especially when he knows I have already provided one for him.”

One lunch was not enough, Yuuri complained. Neither were two lunches, apparently, because Yuuri still complained of hunger pains.

“Go back to Michele,” said Victor, bidding him away, “and later we’ll get something to eat.”

Absently Yuuri nodded and then traipsed off, in that birdlike manner he had, in the direction of his so-called maître. Odd but he was really very easy to ply. It only took a box of raspberries or a promise of rose sorbet to make him sweet on you, if only for a little while. And yet he would have nothing to do with silk or gold or flattery. Strawberries and cream were the only antidotes to all his moods and tempers. At night Victor sometimes wondered if the only reason Yuuri had gone with him the night they’d met was because Victor had promised him a praline. And if the only reason he hadn’t already stormed off back to St. Petersburg was because in St. Petersburg they did not have cerasuolo.

Yes, Yuuri always seemed to be hungry. Starving, in fact. One had to wonder if it was not only the dancing which famished him so much, but all the sweating, all the blushing, the act of throwing himself into the air hundreds of times each day, the dipping of his partner, the feigned romance of the pas de deux. All that muscle, all that heat. Yuuri seemed to run a fever day and night. Like a furnace, he was hot to the touch. Perhaps all of it took more out of him than Victor had realized.

Well, it would be all right. Tomorrow was Sunday. A day of rest. Probably Yuuri would sit in a patch of sunlight all day and ice his feet and not move at all. That, to him, seemed a greater pleasure than anything else in the world.

Indeed on Sundays there was nothing to be done about Yuuri. Victor could never bring himself to bother him. Instead he would spend hours poring over posters, over costumes, chattering to seamstresses, doting on yards of silk and swirling costumes, fabrics in thousands of colors, glittering with jewels like so many stars. He would get another hundred pairs of pointe shoes for the girls, and a box of crushed rosin for the studio. He would telegraph Christophe, send him a poor drawing of a bird or a lamppost or Makkachin (heart and soul annotated), and ignore Yuuri, roosting on the warm, hardwood floors of the parlor. Or he would try to.

He would make coffee on the stovetop, dark and fragrant, with cardamom and vanilla and whatever else was sweet and close at hand. He would sit and wait for someone to notice the smell. There would, for some reason, be enough for two.

 

 

Outside the Théatre du Châtelet, two large posters fluttered in the late summer wind. The once-lush eau de nil paint had cracked, and the pastel dust had faded, but the two dancers, the strange and unearthly stars of La Saison Russe, remained. Anna Pavlova, a dream in her soft tulle skirt, and Yuuri, Yura, Yuurichka, all thighs and fig leaves, his eyes dark and his mouth ungodly, smiling for someone else.

Victor didn’t know how long he stood there, in the drizzling rain, just outside the theatre, looking at the two of them. But by the time he made it backstage, he was soaked through.

 

 

There were only ten minutes before Yuuri was set to go on stage, and yet he was still pacing in his dressing room, shivering even in the sultry heat, the thin silk of his shirt wet through with sweat.

“Stop torturing yourself,” said Victor, wrapping a hand around Yuuri’s elbow, gently pulling him into his own orbit. “You’ll be wonderful. I know it. I just do. It kills me that I won’t be able to give you any roses.”

Somehow, Victor had made it to the night of premier without ever having seen any of the dress rehearsals. He was, after all, only a frontman of sorts, not a maître, not even a patron. And yet for some reason he had faith in Yuuri. He couldn’t say why. It was only a feeling he had, a sort of lazy prophecy, that once Yuuri stepped beneath the hot lights, his makeup would soften, his face would color, his heart would capsize, but by the end of the night he would have charmed every aesthete and aristocrat in Paris.

“After this,” said Victor lowly, just barely brushing a knuckle along the fine upturn of Yuuri’s cheek, “after everyone’s seen you like this,” and he was, of course, referring to the clean silk of Yuuri’s costume, white as sugar, and his face, milky and sweet, “they’ll adore you. They’ll be on their knees for you. Maybe worse.”

“Worse?” said Yuuri, peering up at him.

“I think,” said Victor, with a forlorn sigh, “after tonight, you won’t need me anymore.”

For some reason he thought Yuuri might have something comforting to say to this. Instead Yuuri laughed softly at him, and said nothing of the sort. Oh, well, thought Victor. Here was the end. No more Sundays watching Yuuri sun in another room, no more pulling him around with the hook of his cane, no more sullying him with crème caramel.

“You should go,” said Victor, glancing at the clock. He could already hear the dreamy, textured sound of the orchestra through several feet of plaster. The corps were alive with the sound of Glinka. But he could not bring himself to worry about how the corps were doing, for all of Michele’s tirades about a prima being a first amongst equals, for all the rows they had about Yuuri, about Victor’s obsession and his worship and the unfairness of it all, the injustice of his favoritism. He simply did not care.

For the very first time he realised that if it were not for Yuuri, he would not give a damn about La Saison Russe. He would not be here tonight, stood in a cramped dressing room somewhere in Paris, his forehead pressed to Yuuri’s, his gloves on the hot skin of Yuuri’s bare shoulders. And he would not be stood here, staring at Yuuri’s red mouth, thinking he might get away with it, with wanting to —

“Kiss me,” said Yuuri, softly.

“Not now,” said Victor, flushing.

Yuuri closed his eyes. In the dingy light, his eyelashes cast shadows for what seemed like miles. Victor felt as though his throat had been scraped raw. “You have to go.”

“You’ll be watching me,” said Yuuri. No question mark. Then it was all over, and Victor was alone in Yuuri’s dressing room, feeling winded, feeling as though he had just run up several flights of stairs, staring at the mirror, at his own rosy face and his own bright eyes, which twinkled, as though his reflection knew something that he did not.

 

 

As a child Victor had been kissed by his mother only once, which he believed was the reason why he had grown up to be so utterly useless. Victor Nikiforov could not sing, could not dance, could not whistle in tune, even. On one particularly sore occasion he had found himself, for no obvious reason, in the Palais de Glace all by his lonesome, and he had lasted all of six minutes on the ice before deciding that he was, as with everything else, preternaturally beneath it.

His true talent, it seemed, lay in being a flowerboy. He felt it was a shame that this had not become apparent until now, when he was thirty-eight.

Michele and Christophe had come to greet the audience, of course, but it was Victor who presented Anna Pavlova with her bouquet, and made her smile her offstage smile. The blast of light on the proscenium dazzled him, made it impossible to see anything, a nightmare, really — but it was exciting, all that applause, men and women rising out of their seats one by one, their palms bright red from clapping.

So it had been marvellous. So Victor could not take one step without treading on a long-stemmed rose. He had been struck on the crown by a remarkably hefty water lily, which appeared to have floated down from above, somewhere near the frescos. By his side, Yuuri was flushed, his temples were glossy with sweat, and his hair was a bit of a mess, it was true, but he looked so joyful, so radiant, standing there, taking his bows like a blushing schoolboy. A strange, dreamy feeling rose in Victor. Where Yuuri seemed too shy to meet his eye, Victor turned his head to look at him, helpless but to smile at him, half-dazed and rather fond.

It would have been cruel to leave him alone, when so many thousands of people would have given anything, anything at all to kiss him.

Later Victor would say it was revenge. Some time after that he would claim it was only a fit, some bizarre revolt carried out by his nervous system. He was, and always would be, an incorrigible tease. But anyway. It was there, up on that magnificent stage, on a hot summer night sometime in late July, that he tipped up Yuuri’s chin, leaned forward, and, altogether speaking, was an appalling flowerboy.

“How could you be so stupid,” cried Yuuri, afterwards, his arms around Victor’s neck.

“I’m sorry,” said Victor, laughing through kisses. “I won’t do it again.” He tapped Yuuri’s nose. “But it was for your own good.”

“My own good,” said Yuuri dryly.

“We can’t have any more of these princes asking for an ‘introduction,’” said Victor, pulling away with a frown. “I’ll not have you carted off to be spoiled by another Lvov.”

“No?”

“No.” Victor grinned. “I’m not finished with you yet.”

He felt giddy. Strange. He carried a fervor as though he had just narrowly escaped dying. Yuuri shivered a little in his arms. He was still warm and glossy with sweat, cheeks berry-red, eyes bright. It was difficult to look at him. It was terrible to hold him. Victor was going to take him home. How had he planned on doing that? His legs were still wobbling.

“Are we,” began Yuuri, “going to make introductions?”

“I’d rather die.”

“Me too.”

Fantastic. At this rate Victor was never going to make any money at all. Tonight had cost him seventy-thousand francs, but it didn’t matter.

They left through a small back exit. It was discomfiting, passing through an empty theatre. Yuuri would be used to it, but in Victor’s mind there could be nothing worse: the lonesome stage, the empty seats, the off-putting silence. Like wandering through the belly of a sleeping beast.

Outside, in the summer night air, insects chirped. Victor glimpsed a ladybug on one of his loafers, but left it there and kept walking.

“By the way,” said Victor, as they wandering through the gardens on the way back to the hotel, “back there, I saw you taking a rose out of your bouquet.”

“Hm?” Yuuri looked at him. “Oh, yes. I was going to give it to you. But I dropped it when you — tsk. It’s embarrassing. What did you have to do that for?”

“A kiss,” said Victor, “is an act of homage.”

“Where did you read that?”

“Stop asking questions,” said Victor.

 

 

Their last performance of Le Festin ended in blood. But it wasn’t so terrible as Yuuri thought.

“Oh, you’re so good,” said Victor, fingertips brushing over the new, milk-white bandages wrapped around Yuuri’s ankle. “You couldn’t have chosen a better time to break this.”

Yuuri batted his hand away and rolled over in his cot so that he would not have to look at Victor. He was in a foul mood. The doctor had banished him to bedrest and lolling about for a good few weeks. No dancing, none at all. So Yuuri lay in a crumpled heap on the bed and listened as Victor chattered to him about Massine and Beaumont and La Cigale in Montmartre. He would have to neglect Yuuri for several weeks, but he would have someone deliver soap cakes and real cakes and fresh fruits and bread, everything and anything Yuuri wanted, the moment he wanted it. But Yuuri didn’t care.

“My foot hurts.”

“Obviously your foot hurts,” said Victor, raising an eyebrow. “You broke it.”

“You’re leaving.”

“Ouai,” said Victor, dragging it out sweetly.

“What,” said Yuuri, through gritted teeth, “am I meant to do.”

“Write every day and never forget me,” Victor said. “I’ll have the doctor come in each week. Is that alright?”

“Everyone else is going home.”

“I think I’ll ask him to leave you with some laudanum.” Victor got to his feet. He took a deep breath and sighed. “Don’t act like the world is ending, Yuuri.”

Yuuri said nothing. He didn’t look at Victor. Instead he stared out the window, past the balcony, down at the street, where lovers sat on the bank of the Seine. At the warm, bright sun glitter on the water, at the fat birds poking around for breadcrumbs. His forehead was pale and damp with sweat. Victor hesitated. He wanted to wipe Yuuri’s forehead with a damp cloth, but he had a feeling Yuuri would push him off.

There was a jug of water on the bedside table. There was a vase full of fragrant orchids. There was a box of cigarettes and a matchbox, and a box of Western-style Turkish delight, stuffed with almonds, covered in sugar, the kind that Yuuri liked. That would be enough for now. It was only an ankle. It was only a few weeks.

 

 

Those six weeks in Montmartre might have been the worst of Victor’s life, if he had actually stayed that long.

Yuuri did not write. The production, Mercure, was lavish, electric, modern, scandalous, whatever, who cared. Victor wrote letters each day, all throughout rehearsals and during various shouting rows. He was unhelpful and limped around reluctantly as though someone had plunged a knife into his thigh. From six in the morning until ten at night, for as long as he was awake, he felt as though he was on the point of dying. Everything was so boring. Ballet was so terrible. How had he fetched up in a place like this? In the end he only lasted a week.

“I’m sure it’s very haut monde but I don’t really give a damn,” he said. “I don’t even know who’s dancing Mercury.”

“But you must have watched Léon dance it a thousand times.”

“I don’t know which one he is,” said Victor honestly, rubbing his temples. “I don’t know why you’d want me here.”

And to think, all this time, he had nobody to complain to, nobody to consult. Why didn’t Yuuri write? What if he’d left the apartment? What if he’d left Paris altogether? Victor had frittered an entire week away cooped up in his hotel room, smoking in bed, writing atrocious love letters, only interrupting this dribble to complain that any rehearsal without Yuuri was an utter waste of time.

At night he dreamed about their reunion, or else he had nightmares about coming home to an empty apartment, devoid of any trace of Yuuri. No wet bandages, no morphine, no uneaten strawberry tops. No boy fast asleep in the sunlight. All the curtains drawn, the room dark, cold, empty.

 

 

“They did everything I said, exactly as I said it,” said Victor, now that he was home. “I said jump, they said yes, but if I may ask, how high would you like it?” He scoffed. “Stupid.”

Yuuri lay curled up on the divan, his head wrapped in a damp, fluffy towel. His eyes were closed. His face was calm. At some point he had come down with a cold, so he didn’t say much to Victor. That was fine.

“They were all so lovely, but none of them wanted to have a row with me.” Victor clicked his tongue. “How I missed you…”

“You missed fighting with me,” croaked Yuuri. Victor had expected more languishing from him, more of a sulk — but battered and bruised as he was, wrapped up like a shoddily repaired doll, Yuuri seemed to be in relatively good spirits.

_Don’t act like the world is ending_ , he’d said. What an awful thing to say. A dancer, a boy like Yuuri, would train from the age of two or three for hours every day, ravished by diets and tendinitis, by splints and poor reviews in Le Figaro, and this would go on for decades, a lifetime, really. And for what? What then, after the flowers and applause, after one had taken all one’s bows? A danzatore would perform for a hundred hours, maybe, but before that he would spend ten thousand hours in rehearsals and in class, in studios and dormitories, warming up and starving, always starving. There could be no dream, no hope of being loved beyond the stage. In ten, twenty years, Victor wondered, where would his darling be? Where did ballerinas go to die?

“More than anything. I wanted you to come and find me. I wanted you to scream at me. Why didn’t you write?”

“What would I write?”

“I wouldn’t know!” Victor complained. Yuuri smiled at him. “I thought that when I got back you’d cry on my chest. I was going to let you be as jealous as you like. I was ready to kiss you a thousand times and change your bandages and wash your hair.”

“Vityusha,” mumbled Yuuri, eyes fluttering open.

“You’re the only one left, you know,” said Victor leaning over him, chin in hand. His eyes were bright. “Everyone else — they’ll all be in St. Petersburg by now.”

What was Yuuri waiting for? And what was waiting for him, back in Russia? Yuuri yawned. He didn’t seem to worry about such things. Well then. Victor would have to worry for him.

“Would you ever do it again, Yura?” he asked, suddenly, touching Yuuri’s shoulder. “The shows, the dancing, the hotel rooms. All of it, with me.”

“Here?” asked Yuuri. “In Paris? Next summer?”

“Anywhere,” said Victor. “London, Berlin, Venice. We could be a company. You’d be my star.”

“Ah,” said Yuuri, face going pink. “And you’d be the director?”

Victor laughed. “I’d be your boy,” he said.

“But of course,” said Yuuri dryly. He stirred, shuffled around beneath his mess of blankets, sniffled a bit. These were signs of life, one after another. Tentatively, he glanced up at Victor through his lashes, then looked down again. “I’ve never been to Rome,” he said, coyly.

“Oh?” This was it, Victor thought. “I think you’d like it there. Boys, wine, opera. You know.”

All of a sudden it seemed only natural to take Yuuri to Italy, where ballet had been born. What else was there to do? They could go home, or they could storm heaven. The answer was obvious. The heartache persisted. The show would go on.


End file.
